Scorsese, currently showing at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, is not exactly the exhibition that is advertised, and that is a very good thing. Martin Scorsese's career has stretched over half a century and involves nearly sixty films. Yet anyone who has seen advance press and publicity for Scorsese could be forgiven for thinking the focus is mainly on the early and more masculine examples of his oeuvre, Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), and Raging Bull (1980).

These movies are certainly compelling, both as individual examples of film craft and for the way they play into the myths and realities of 1970s American cinema, when Scorsese, along with fellow directors and friends Francis Ford Coppola, Stephen Spielberg, and Brian De Palma, tilted against the ailing Hollywood studio system and then become some of its leading lights. But these films in no way tell Scorsese's whole story.